Video: How to Best Structure Your Google Shopping Campaigns

Now that the transition to Google Shopping Campaigns is complete, how should your new campaigns be structured? Are you taking full advantage of all the new features Shopping Campaigns offer?

Join Sarah Carpenter and Todd Bowman in part two of this three-part video series as they cover best practices for structuring your Google Shopping Campaigns, along with the pros and cons of three potential campaign structures.

Todd Bowman: In the first episode of our Google Shopping Campaign video blog series, Sarah spoke about the differences between legacy PLAs and the new Google Shopping Campaign structure. Today, we’re going to talk about three different strategies that you can take in building your campaigns so that it’s good for the scalable future and better for your business.

Sarah: So, in the beginning the first available structure was one campaign and one ad group. And the main benefit of this is there is a lot of transparency into how the products are serving from within the product groups. This is because within Shopping Campaigns a product will only serve from the most granular product group.

So, for example, if you have a dining tables product group and also a furniture product group in the same ad group, then that dining table is always going to serve from the dining tables product group. So, this isn’t how the legacy PLAs work. You’d be eligible to serve from both auto targets. And with this additional transparency it makes it a lot easier to appropriately value your targets and make sure that you are making the best and most precise bidding decisions.

Todd: While increased visibility of where products are being served is definitely beneficial to the strategy, one of the biggest disadvantages is that having one ad group means that all of your products that you’re advertising on have the same negatives and the same mobile modifiers because they have to be set at that ad group level. This might work very well for clients that have low traffic or even ones that have basically the same type of products throughout their catalog, but if you’re selling cookware and bar accessories, customers searching on mobile devices are probably going to behave differently. So you want to have a different modifier and you also want to have different negatives for those certain categories.

Sarah: And that’s where our second strategy comes in, which is still one campaign, but having multiple ad groups. And then you can decide how many ad groups you need based upon the performance differences and the different sets of negative keywords and different mobile modifiers that are necessary.

Todd: While having multiple ad groups is very good to help you manage based off negatives and modifiers, it does require complex bidding because now you do kind of go back to what the legacy PLA issue was of having products being able to serve in multiple product groups. The other thing to remember is as you add ad groups in a new Shopping Campaign structure, each new ad group will contain an All Products product group. You have the ability now to exclude that product group and you’ll want to do that every time that you create the new ad groups so that you don’t have multiple catch-alls in your campaign.

Sarah: And that leads us to our third and our RKG-preferred strategy, which is having multiple campaigns and multiple ad groups. So, this allows you to take all the benefits from strategy two, but it also gives you the ability to layer on campaign priorities. Campaign priorities are a functionality that Google added for Shopping Campaigns that allow us to tell Google, if a product is eligible to serve for multiple campaigns, which campaign to take the bid from. So, this does give you more control in filtering and controlling that traffic. You can learn more about campaign priorities in our first video blog and also in Andy Taylor’s blog post.

Todd: So, let’s take a look at this third strategy in action. What we’ll start with is our All Products product group. This is our catch-all. Usually keep a low bid on this, as it is that catch-all, and we’ll put it in as a low priority campaign.

Our next campaign will be a medium priority campaign and that’s going to be our standard campaign where we have all of our product groups set up by category or subcategory, whatever structure you decide to go with, but then it’ll have the multiple ad groups. The third campaign will have our promotions or any outliers that we want to call out, and that’ll have a high priority on it. Again, the high priority means that if Google sees that a product is eligible on multiple campaigns, it will take the higher priority bid.

So, in this third high priority campaign we want to grab… if we have products that are performing poorly and we want to bid those very low, we can put that in a high priority campaign and know that they’re going to have a low bid, or we could put products that are on sale, products that have free shipping, any other type of promos where we really want to increase the bid and get those products out there because we know that they’re going to convert better, we put that into the higher priority campaign.

Sarah: So, that concludes our brief look at different strategies to utilize in your Shopping Campaigns, and we hope that you found some new ideas to explore in your account. Stay tuned for our third and final installment of this video blog series where we’ll report back on post-migration results.